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vaseline

Recently I discovered I have an addiction. My close amigas have probably known for eight years or so. My family know. My boyfriend knew pretty early on. It would appear that I was the last to know.
It’s not an addiction that has caused me, or anyone else any harm. It’s not an addiction that interferes with my job or life. it hasn’t drained my money. Lost me friends. Prevented me from leading some kind of normal life. However it is something that can make me feel kind of anxious and uncomfortable when I don’t have it and big relief when I do.

Are you ready to know?

LIP BALM.
I am a lip balm addict.

I was in denial when the bf mentioned it. But then I classically did a wee bit of googling and discovered there’s a whole website dedicated to helping people with lip balm addiction.

It even has a self-assessment quiz with about 30 questions and states that if you answered YES to one or more of these questions, you probably have a problem.

Do you use whatever lip balm you have almost continuously until the supply is exhausted? HELLS YEAH

Do you have an obsession to get lip balm when you don’t have it? MAAAAAAYBE

When you start using are you more in a hurry to get the first hit than you used to be? HANG ON. ARE WE TALKING ABOUT LIP BALM OR HEROIN HERE? (My answer is no to both by the way)

Can you apply lip balm with one hand? WHO NEEDS TWO HANDS TO APPLY IT? LIKE ONE HAND PER LIP? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS.

The lip balm addiction website also has a list of twelve steps (like the AA, right?) to giving up lip balm. They get very into talking about God quickly so I have a feeling the lip balm addiction website is actually a front for a cult (I think everything is a cult though).

I used to swim a lot and the chlorine did wonders for drying my entire body out – so maybe that’s when I started using lip balm excessively. Vaseline was for many years my favoured lip balm (I thought the tins were cute). I don’t have heaps of memories from school but I do remember my friends hiding my Vaseline from me once and feeling quite distraught about it. (It’s okay guys, I forgave you within a nanosecond).

Until a few weeks ago, putting lip balm on was the first thing I did in the morning, after I’d brushed my teeth, multiple times throughout the day, and the last thing I did before going to sleep. With gentle encouragement from the boy and very stubborn blood running through my veins, I decided to cut down to using it twice a day. Shit, I do sound like an addict.

The first day my lips felt super dry and cracked, like elongated raisins. This was totally my brain playing tricks because when I felt them they actually felt kind of soft and were not cracked at all. I spent the day licking my lips often, looking quite insane. I also thought about my lips for the entire day (what a waste of thoughts!!). But after a few days I wasn’t thinking about it all the time and I wasn’t feeling uncomfortable.

This is good because before I cut down I went for breakfast with bae and his friend and I used lip balm (paw paw magical ointment is lip balm of choice these days) about four times during breakfast. I felt really self conscious every time I got it out of my bag to use and that was the point I realised maybe I did have a small kind of trivial addiction to it. NOBDOY NEEDS THAT MUCH LIP BALM.